As it happened, I was an early adopter, by acquiring the official Android Package (APK) file someone with a US Google Play account, and installing it on my own device using the Android developer tools.

The game wasn’t officially available in the UK when I first tried, but it was already as much of a social media sensation as in the US.

Users were flocking to it, either by creating made-up accounts overseas, or by “sideloading” a copy of an officially-installed version, as I did, or by finding a locally-available pirate site and installing from there.

Flocking might be an understatement, in fact, because even in its UK “pre-launch” period, load was so high that I kept getting this message:

For many in the UK, that continued throughout the weekend, even after the official launch, and continues as I write this [2016-07-18T15:00Z].

I’m guessing, a trifle cynically but probably entirely accurately, that the average person doesn’t wait a whole hour, or even, for that matter, a whole minute.

In other words, the Pokémon GO network is clearly under very heavy load, and that’s without the ministrations of any spoilsport hackers.

As indeed, the hacker collective known as @PoodleCorp tweeted this weekend:

Of course, that makes you think: “Did Pokémon GO struggle because of natural load, or were the Poodlers somehow involved in a DDOs?

DDoS is short for Distributed Denial of Service, where you arrange for a huge amount of purposeless traffic to a website or online service, in order to dilute the bandwidth left over for real customers. It’s a bit like standing in the queue at the station while seven people in front of you ask genuine-sounding questions one by one, such as “When is the next train to Reading? Can I take my bicycle? What about the Sunday timetable? Is there any trackwork planned in 2017?”, and then simply walk off without buying a ticket or catching a train at all, just to make you late (and irate). Many network DDoSes are orchestrated using bots, also known as zombies. Zombies are infected computers that can be commanded in unison, by far-flung crooks, to waste the time and effort of an online service.

PoodleCorp doesn’t seem to be claiming responsibility for the Pokémon GO network’s struggles last weekend, but the group is openly threatening a DDoS on 01 August 2016.

There’s not a lot you can do (and it’s not your phone that’s under attack, anyway)…

…except perhaps to have a Plan B up your sleeve for the first of August.

Go to work? To the shops? To the beach? Go for a walk without your phone? Read stuff on the internet using a regular browser?

If you have any good ideas for filling the void of Pokémon GO outages, please share them below.

Location is completely *on*. (This is a test phone, you understand. A surplus-to-requirements loaner that I wipe before every experiment. I have never needed GPS before on this device…could be faulty for all I know. I can get a fix if I am outside, using some test code, but it takes ages. I assume the app is giving up on me. My own Plan B is not to try too hard to fix it, in case I do and it starts working.)

Hi Paul, I had the same issue. I’m assuming if you’re a developer you may have the “Allow mock locations” setting turned on. Try turning off this setting and restarting your game. Fixed the issue for me!

re: “good ideas for filling the void of Pokémon GO outages” – When Blizzard’s World of Warcraft servers are down for updates (as they are right now), I read eBooks on my tablet. I’m currently re-reading my collection of books by L.E. Modesitt Jr. and highly recommend his books. I have all of them both in Audible Audio and Kindle format. I don’t have a Kindle, but play the audiobook on my tablet while simultaneously manually turning the pages in the Kindle eBook.
With earbuds, this helps me tune out the sound of my wife’s audiobooks playing from the next room. 😉

“If you have any good ideas for filling the void of Pokémon GO outages, please share them below.”

How about taking a one-day break away from being a mind-controlled zombie, and instead getting together with friends — in person — sans smartphones? Go to the beach, go to lunch, go to a park and toss Frisbies…

In the words of “Why Don’t You” an eighties UK kids magazine show – “Just switch off your TV set (mobile phone in this case) and do something less boring instead” – you could build a papier-mâché Tracey island following the instructions of Lesley Judd on Blue Peter, another age old BBC kids TV show.